Twenty-two million U.S. teenagers log onto Instagram every day. Teenagers spend on average seven and a half hours on their phones every day. It comes as no surprise that the companies profiting off of this extended amount of time target and manipulate teens.
An investigation started in 2021; Attorney Generals looked into Meta’s strategies for getting young people to spend more time on its platform. They found that allowing users to infinitely scroll and sending teenagers constant push notifications was luring them to spend hours on these companies' apps. It also discovered that Meta failed to change harmful features such as these even though it knew through internal research about the potentially dangerous effects.
Meta’s public image took another hit in 2021 as Frances Haugen, former Facebook product manager, disclosed tens of thousands of internal company documents. These documents displayed that Facebook was worsening body image issues and suicidal thoughts. In late October this year, Attorney General Bonta co-led a bipartisan coalition of 33 attorneys general in filing a federal lawsuit against Meta Platforms Inc. and affiliates.
He has been joined by thirty-two other states in this conquest against Meta. The lawsuit alleges that Meta violated federal and state laws that help to safeguard children’s privacy. The suit outlines Meta’s misconduct: business model focused on maximizing young users' time on its platforms, using psychologically harmful and manipulative platform features while misleading the public about the safety of the features, publishing misleadingly low rates of user harm in reports, and the refusal or downplaying of the harms and adverse effects of its platforms.
The lawsuit also accuses Meta of violating children’s privacy laws as the platform collects personal data from children without parental consent. It is obvious to most people that Meta’s social media companies target young people, an example being their hosting of “child-oriented” content about Sesame Street, Lego, and Hello Kitty. The suit is seeking injunctive and monetary relief to address Meta’s misconduct; they hope to change the practices of social media companies by changing the default settings and limiting how much time young people spend on the apps.
It also urges companies to tweak how they’re recommending content to teens as it is easy to get pulled down a rabbit hole of harmful videos and images. As of now, 42 Attorneys General have joined in the cause displaying the vast support across states in shutting down this manipulative and corrupt behavior that affects the most vulnerable people in our nation.